England play Moldova on Friday night and ITV will be hoping the nation, at least the English bit of it, are glued to the box to see if Roy Hodgson’s men can make some progress towards those World Cup finals in football’s other home, Brazil.

I’ll probably end up watching Celebrity Masterchef.

It never used to be like this.

I can remember those mornings after the night before, when the national bubble of euphoria had been burst after another penalty shoot-out failure. The feeling of despair heading into work; just about every radio station covering the glorious failure, just about everyone in work feeling the same.

Just about everyone you spoke to felt the same, even people who never normally watched football would be caught up in it, every step nearer the final having dragged more and more people into it being part of it all. And you really felt like you were part of it all, for the highs and the inevitable lows.

Of course that was during the finals. It wasn’t quite so intense for the qualifiers – those who don’t normally do football certainly don’t do it on cold November nights. But for the rest of us those qualifiers were still essential viewing, if only because the club football had been put on hold and we needed something else to talk about. You still felt like you were part of that.

Not any more.

Bleurgh (Image: ITV)

My Friday nights might not be as wild and exciting as they were years ago but I'm not sure I want to spend them with Adrian Chiles talking about Roy Hodgson. Especially not to a brass soundtrack of ‘the Great Escape’.

It doesn’t help that Roy Hodgson is England manager (we’ve got previous) but my interest in England had waned long before he got the job. It’s not down to Adrian Chiles all that much either – after all there’s always the mute button, which also helps with that band.

When a player gets injured for his club the commentator tells us what a worry it is for the England manager – yet when he gets injured for England there’s little thought of how it’s going to be a worry for his club manager. Players score winning goals in massive club games then afterwards the post-match interviews are all about how good it is for England that this player was finding his scoring form just at the right time. It’s like that big club match was little more than a warm up for the England match.

Most of the time the observations and questions are pretty harmless, after all there’s a limit to how many ways you can ask a player what it felt like to score that goal. But at times there’s a strong sense that England’s cheerleaders think of the Premier League as some sort of vulgar inconvenience.

The FA themselves show this attitude most of all.

Greg Dyke has big ideas, but will anything change? (Image: AFP)

Clubs ask England to go easy on a certain player, he’s carrying a bit of a strain and it’s only a friendly after all. England use the player for 88 minutes, until he’s stretchered off and out for weeks, that strain turning into a full-blown injury. He misses a stream of important games for his club because England felt their friendly was more important.

Players come back from international duty for other countries carrying injuries – but if the England circle had its way there’d be far less of those foreign players in the Premier League anyway. English clubs should use more English players, regardless of how good they are, for the sake of the English national side. Again, it’s an attitude that suggests club football is there purely as a feeder for the England squad, the warm-up to the main event.

I can’t remember the last time an England game felt like the main event.

When Roy Hodgson turned up at Anfield on Sunday, only to find there was no padded seat reserved for him to sit in and no room at the buffet in the boardroom it was quite likely to be down to an oversight somewhere along the line. Liverpool found him somewhere to sit, somewhere to go at half-time and made sure he still got to see those players warming up for England in that minor low-key clash between Liverpool and Manchester United.

Yet the attitude from some of those England cheerleaders was that Liverpool had acted disgracefully and that some of those sponsors in that director’s box should have been turfed out to make way for the manager of England.

It’s unbelievably arrogant – unbelievable until you remember it’s just the England way.

It’ll be a shame if England don’t qualify for Brazil, especially for Steven Gerrard who will almost certainly have it down as his last international tournament, but maybe it would finally lead to a shake-up in attitudes at Wembley.

Maybe the old men in blazers would finally accept that club football is far more popular than their branch of the game, maybe they’ll show it some respect, work with it instead of looking down on it, in turn benefiting 'Team England'.